AI Persona - Interactive User Research & Discovery
A web app for founders, product teams, and educators to interview AI-powered personas, run interactive panel workshops, and auto-generate empathy and journey maps from transcripts, accelerating early-stage research and idea validation.
User research and early-stage idea validation are historically slow and expensive. Coordinating live interviews takes weeks; recruiting specific demographics is difficult; and running interactive workshops requires heavy planning. AI Persona was built to remove that bottleneck, letting founders, product managers, designers, and educators talk to simulated users and run interactive panel discussions instantly, before investing in prototyping or heavy research setup.
The idea is simple: define a persona, have a real conversation with it, and let the app turn that transcript into an empathy map or customer journey map automatically. No scheduling, no recruiting, no waiting.
What It Does
AI Persona is a fully live, publicly accessible web app at aipersona.manzarhaq.com. It offers:
- Instant personas to talk to covering a library of pre-built personas across professional archetypes (CFO, HR manager, startup founder) and more creative characters, ready to chat with no sign-up required
- Custom persona builder to create your own persona by filling in a form or just describing who you need in natural language and letting AI fill in the rest
- Multi-turn conversations with natural back-and-forth chat with a persona that stays in character, remembers context, and responds with depth
- One-click empathy maps so once a conversation reaches depth, you can generate a structured empathy map (Says / Thinks / Does / Feels) directly from the transcript
- Journey maps that capture a persona’s experience across stages, with emotions, pain points, and design opportunities surfaced per stage
- Community personas to browse and chat with personas created and shared by other users
The Value
For founders, PMs, and designers working without a research budget, this compresses weeks of discovery into minutes. It won’t replace real user interviews, but it’s a powerful way to stress-test assumptions, rehearse discovery questions, refine interview guides, and build empathy before investing in prototyping.
It’s also a practical tool for design students and teams learning how to run the empathize phase of Design Thinking.
Flexible Tiers & Benefits
To support different scales of research and design thinking workshops, AI Persona is free to get started, with Standard and Pro tiers offering increased usage:
- Free Tier: Try full workflow, no card needed. Access to 1-on-1 chat, journey maps, panel insights, empathy maps, and persona builder.
- Standard Tier (£4.99 for 30 days): For regular discovery work. Same features as Free with higher usage limits and more monthly persona generations.
- Pro Tier (£8.99 for 30 days): For power users. Full access to all features with highest limits and unlimited saved personas.
How It’s Built
AI Persona is a modern, fully live web app. AI responses are generated in real-time and stream directly into the conversation, and a subscription handles the higher tiers for heavier users. It’s designed to be fast, mobile-friendly, and delightful to use.